Almost a century ago, in 1927, The Atlantic published “An Open Letter to the Honorable Alfred E. Smith,” written by a Protestant lawyer, Charles Marshall. As with most of the nation’s venerable magazines, the editors of The Atlantic enjoyed a good anti-Catholic screed, and the ongoing presidential campaign of Smith, New York’s governor, provided an easy target. Long before he gave his name to an annual—and in recent years, controversial—fundraiser in New York City, Al Smith was one of the nation’s most prominent politicians, and the first Catholic ever to mount a serious run at the White House.
A “loyal and conscientious Roman Catholic,” Marshall argued, could never be the U.S. president, for the simple reason that Catholics are beholden first to the man in Rome. What would happen if a Catholic president were to take seriously the 19th-century papal encyclicals that made it clear that the Catholic Church stood above and over any secular political realm? Wouldn’t he or she have to forsake the Constitution in obedience to such encyclicals? The subtext—Catholics are not real Americans—was clear, but Marshall found an enthusiastic audience. Remember, this was an era when a picture of Smith smiling and shaking hands at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel was widely circulated with a caption claiming it was Smith’s secret tunnel to his masters in Rome.
As the story goes, Al Smith read the essay and asked his aides: “What the hell is an encyclical?”
Maybe true, maybe not. Se non è vero, è ben trovato. What that story does make clear, however, is how much the political stakes for Catholic politicians have changed over the past century—or even half-century, considering the careful way John F. Kennedy had to assure a majority-Protestant nation in 1960 that he would not be Rome’s minion if elected president. If you read the headlines these days, you’ll notice something different: Catholics at the highest reaches of government lecturing the Vatican on public policy and theology.
Smith—his family name was Ferraro, Americanized to Smith in an earlier generation—was born in New York City in 1873 to Catholic parents, the descendants of Italian and Irish immigrants. Financial difficulties, including the death of his father when Smith was just 13, meant that he never attended high school, working from an early age at the Fulton Fish Market. He married at age 27, a few years after his first foray into politics as a Tammany Hall-sponsored court investigator. From 1904 to 1915, he served in the New York Assembly, earning a reputation as a “New Era Progressive” for his policies and advocacy of expanded government programs, and was elected governor for the first time in 1918 with a little help from his friends at Tammany Hall.
Voted out of office in 1920, Smith returned to win the gubernatorial election in 1922, 1924 and 1926. He first ran for president in 1924, in part on his bona fides as a “drippingly wet” candidate who was opposed to Prohibition, but withdrew from the race after a bruising convention in which neither he nor his closest opponent could garner two-thirds of the delegate votes. Four years later, he tried again—but it was 1928, not 1929, and a prosperous country voted for Herbert Hoover in a landslide.
Did Smith’s religion also hurt his cause? Probably. The Rev. Bob Jones Sr., a prominent Protestant minister—yes, the one who founded Bob Jones University—said that “I'd rather see a saloon on every corner of the South than see the foreigners elect Al Smith president.”
Smith ran again in 1932, but was defeated in the primary by his successor as governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt. In the meantime, he had served as president of the company that built the Empire State Building. Construction on the iconic landmark which opened in 1931 as the world’s tallest building began—per Smith’s instructions—on St. Patrick’s Day in 1930.
Smith died of a heart attack in 1944, just a few months after the death of his wife. Among his descendants was a grandson by the same name who became an Augustinian priest.
Smith’s political endeavors were a constant source of commentary from the editors of and contributors to America, in no small part because he was by far the most prominent Catholic public official in the nation. As early as 1924, the editors were decrying the anti-Catholic bigotry aimed at Smith and other politicians, arguing that no Catholic pol “was improperly influenced in the exercise of his office by orders, or even suggestions, emanating from the Bishop of Rome or from any Roman Congregation.”
When the University of Notre Dame honored Smith with its Laetare Medal in 1926, America congratulated him and waved the flag a bit: “As a public servant, a private citizen, and a man, he merits and receives the respect and the affection of all Catholics.” Throughout his political career, America didn’t endorse Smith’s candidacies—technically the magazine is not allowed to do that—but the editors always made it clear where their sympathies lay.
The United States has now had two Catholic presidents, and the current Vice President entered the church in 2019. While anti-Catholic bigotry is no longer a primary concern of most Catholic politicians, there remain political issues on which the faith of any politician (or voter) remains pertinent and public. Thank Al Smith for paving the way, wrote Terry Golway in a 2019 article for America. (Golway's book on the 1928 election, Frank and Al, was reviewed in America by deputy editor in chief Tim Reidy in 2018). As Smith noted in 1928, the country was not ready for a president who “can say his beads in the White House.” None other than Franklin Roosevelt himself said at the time that in the United States, “Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.”
A century later, Golway noted, “no one could argue that nothing has changed for Catholic politicians.” He wrote in 2019:
One of the 2020 Catholic presidential hopefuls, the former mayor of San Antonio, Julián Castro, speaks openly about his faith—so much so that a recent Washington Post headline stated something that Smith could hardly have imagined: “Democrat Julián Castro makes his Catholicism central to his presidential campaign.” The Post story noted that Mr. Castro so frequently invoked Our Lady of Guadalupe that “she might as well have been his running mate.”
Not something Al Smith would have been able to pull off a century ago—but the sea change in attitudes is in large part due to his early efforts to make it clear one could be both a devout Catholic and a patriotic American. That same year, 2019, the legendary historian Robert Caro had this to say: “The more you learn about Al Smith, the more you realize he is probably the most forgotten consequential figure in American history.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Bat,” by Lance Le Grys. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
- The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
- Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
- What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
- Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
- Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
